Nihilism and antisemitism: the reception of Céline's Journey to the End of the Night in Israel

Abstract

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is considered one of the most pro-Nazi, antisemitic writers in Europe. In 1994, an intense controversy arose in Israel after the decision to translate into Hebrew and publish his novel, Journey to the End of the Night. The heated debate soon went beyond the question of the book's publication. This essay analyzes Céline's reception in Israel, and more specifically, the controversy that erupted over the translation of Journey. It argues that while this debate was relatively minor in the context of the heated polemics on the Holocaust, it nevertheless has significant implications on both contemporary public discourse on the Holocaust and the limits of political criticism in Israel. Israeli intellectual discourse is framed, to a large extent, I contend, within the borders of Auschwitz, a metaphor for the borders of consciousness of many Jewish-Israelis, from both the left and the right. To this day, the trauma of the Holocaust is still present in Israeli society in a way that determines what is legitimate to read, discuss, and disagree with. Furthermore, by examining the different voices in this controversy, I demonstrate how the Israeli ‘Céline affair’ in the mid-1990s moves us away from the overstated positions of the major debates, and sheds new light on the specter of the Holocaust in Israel in seemingly non-political discussions of culture, art, and leisure. The political underpinnings of the Céline controversy, I conclude, are not clear or clear cut, and are not defined by the traditional political camps in Israel. The implication is that public Holocaust debates represent an autonomous field, subordinated to no political party dictates, and yet are still political. The public debate that followed the translation of Journey serves as a watershed. It shows us how at the end of every political–cultural divide in Israeli society, we arrive at ‘Auschwitz’ as a metaphor for the existential threat.

Keywords::

• Céline
• Journey
• nihilism
• antisemitism
• Holocaust
• Israel

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nitzan Lebovic, Nirit Ben Ari, and Valeria Galimi for their helpful comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank Ilana Hamerman and Gila Haimovic for their advice.

Notes

^1. Another scholar who has argued that we cannot separate Céline's pamphlets from his novels is Carroll (1995a, 1995b).

^2. This topic has not yet been examined in Israel or elsewhere. Only a handful of articles on Céline have been published in Israeli academic journals, most of them concerning his antisemitic writings, but not specifically the translation of Journey. A quasi academic article dealing with the controversy over Céline in Hebrew is by Israel Gutman (1994). Other articles in Hebrew dealing with the pamphlets are by Wardi (1989) and Weisbrod (2008). More generally, not a single book has been published about Céline in Hebrew to date. The only literary analysis of Céline available in Hebrew is a book by Shaanan (1976), which dedicates one chapter to Journey.

^3. This translation is from Mason (2010, 17).

^4. Quoted in Vitoux (1992, 232).

^5. Quoted in Pagés (1994, 321).

^6. Cf: Hamerman (1994a, 579). Indeed, Céline's contribution to anti-war literature was significant; he greatly influenced, for example, Joseph Heller's Catch 22. See Buckley (1989, 11).

^7. The title of Jean-Paul Sartre's play from 1944.

^8.Bagatelles pour un massacre has been anonymously translated and is available at http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres6/CELINEtrif.pdf.

^9. Knesset members who took part in the public discussion about Journey included Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party (Mafdal) and Limor Livnat of the Likud, both right-wing parties. Livnat, who called the decision to publish the book ‘a terrible tragedy,’ supported Yahalom, who initiated a Knesset motion to boycott Céline's book (Broadcast from the Knesset on Channel 33, 2 February 1994).

^10. The majority of the articles appeared between January and April 1994 mostly in Haaretz, but also in other newspapers, including YediothAhronoth, Ma'ariv, and Davar, and were of various types: opinions, letters to the editor, long essays, and exchanges of opinions. Items on this topic appeared also in smaller and even local newspapers, such as Yated Ne'eman (ultra-Orthodox daily newspaper), Bnei Brak Journal, Al HaMishmar, Hazofe, and the Journal of the Teachers’ Union. Altogether, 58 items/articles were published in newspapers, five items broadcast on the radio, and five items on television shows. All the quotations provided hereafter from Israeli media are my translation.

^11. Other intellectuals who supported the translation and publication of Journey were historian Saul Friedländer, author Batya Gur, translator Nili Mirsky, journalist and author Amnon Dankner, painter and sculptor Yigal Tumarkin, poet and translator Meir Wieseltier, author and poet Uri Bernstein, and historian and journalist Tom Segev.

^12. For several criticisms of Ohana's interpretation of Journey, see Ophir (1994) and Zand (1994a, 1994b).

^13. As Hamerman reveals in an interview, a few years before the publication of Journey by Am Oved she offered to translate the book for Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, but was turned down due to Céline's ideological views. In 1990, she raised the idea once again, this time with Am Oved, where she worked, and after a long discussion by the Board of the publishing house, she received a green signal to start working on the translation. See Milner (1994, 39–40).

^14. Hamerman expressed this view in a discussion about the translation of Journey at the Bugrashov Gallery in Tel Aviv, as was reported in the radio show ‘Good Morning Israel,’ broadcast on Israeli Army Radio on 15 March 1994.

^15. These are Sternhell's words in an interview to Nurit Levilicht. See Levilicht (1994, 65).

^16. It is not clear who coined the term ‘post-Zionism’ or when. Some people ascribe it to Professor Menachem Brinker of the Hebrew University, who used the term in its Hebrew version, though with a slightly different meaning, in 1986; others ascribe it to sociologist Arik Cohen of the Hebrew University. See Silberstein (1996, 105, n. 5).

^17. The term ‘new historians’ was coined by Benny Morris to describe a group of historians who were re-examining the historiography of the 1940s and 1950s in light of new archival documentation discovered within the past 20 years. See Morris (1994).

^18. The works of Ram reflect the agenda of post-Zionism. See Ram (1993, 1995). Kimmerling summarizes post-Zionist criticism in his 1995 article.

^19. The late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling rejected this label, for example, in an interview with Dalia Karpel. See Karpel (1996).

^20. For a comprehensive analysis of the Zionist/post-Zionist debate, see Silberstein (1996).

^21. For a useful collection of the major newspaper articles regarding the Holocaust and the post-Zionism debate in Israel, see Michman (1997).

^22. Rezső [Rudolf] Israel Kastner (1906–1957), a Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist, was a leading member of the Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah (the Aid and Rescue Committee) – a small Jewish group in Budapest that attempted to help Jewish refugees escape from Nazi Europe during the Holocaust. Following the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944, the Rescue Committee negotiated with SS officers in an attempt to save Jewish lives. Kastner, who negotiated directly with Adolf Eichmann, was later accused in Israel of collaboration with the Nazis and was assassinated in 1957. His trial had major political implications in Israel during the 1950s.

^23. In 1990, the penultimate anti-German taboo was broken when Israeli orchestras began to play the music of Richard Strauss. Argentine-born Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim argued that the time had come to be rid of the final taboo and to play Richard Wagner's music in public. In 2001, Barenboim challenged the ban by performing Wagner's overture to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in Jerusalem. However, to this day the official position of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra is not to play Wagner. A representative of the Philharmonic public relations unit told me that a survey of the orchestra's subscribers revealed that the majority of them objected to the orchestra playing Wagner and found it insulting.

^24. Responses to Elkana's article were strong. Israel Eldad, former Lehi leader and a right-wing polemicist, branded it ‘a moral, educational, and psychological atrocity’ (Eldad 1988, 9). Titles of other responses were: ‘In Favor of Learning’ (Keren 1988); and ‘In favor of remembering’ (Feldman 1988).

^25. In another article, Sternhell specifically referred to Elkana's essay and criticized its message. See Sternhell (1994).

^26. Rehavam Ze'evi, who advocated the transfer of the Arab population from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to neighboring Arab countries, was assassinated by three Palestinians in 2001.

^27. On 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at the end of a rally in support of the Oslo Accords in Tel Aviv by Yigal Amir, a right-wing religious Zionist who strove to halt the progress of the peace process. A month earlier, on 5 October 1995, a photo of Rabin in a uniform of an SS officer appeared on photomontage posters carried by radical right protestors at a right-wing demonstration in Jerusalem. Prior to the Rabin assassination, there were very few cases of political murders in Israel: Kastner (see note 22 above) and Emil Grunzweig, a peace activist affiliated with the Peace Now movement, who was killed by a grenade thrown at a peace rally in Jerusalem in 1983.

^28. A contemporary political debate in Israel concerns the problem of African refugees and asylum seekers and the treatment they receive by the authorities, for example, their incarceration in “Holot” detention facility near the Egyptian border. On the one hand, many people, Holocaust survivors among them, have expressed their shock that Jews in the State of Israel would seek to deport human beings in distress. On the other hand, several government ministers, particularly ultra-Orthodox, warn against the dangers involved in assimilating foreign elements into Jewish culture.

^29. Following the demonstration in Jerusalem by ultra-Orthodox groups, in which protesters dressed in concentration camp uniforms and wore yellow Stars of David on their clothing bearing the word ‘Jude,’ in January 2012, the Knesset approved a bill proposal banning the use of Nazi symbols. In January 2014, Israel's Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill that would forbid the use of the word “Nazi” in any form, as well as words with similar sounds, for any reason.

^30. In his article, Elkana argued that the deeds committed by the Germans during the Holocaust could recur anywhere, even in Israel.

^31. Arendt's book on Eichmann was translated into Hebrew only in 2000. Her earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1979), was translated only recently, in 2010. Today Arendt is becoming increasingly popular among certain academic circles in Israel. Two scholars who have written about her are author and translator Michal Ben-Naftali and historian Idith Zertal. Similarly, Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), a cornerstone in Holocaust studies, was translated into Hebrew and published by Yad Vashem only in 2012. For decades, Yad Vashem avoided translating this work due to Hilberg's harsh criticism of the Judenrat.

^32. Taken from ‘A debate on the translation of the book Journey to the End of the Night by French author Céline,’ on the Israeli television show, Yoman Tarbut, moderated by Yael Dan, with the participation of Zeev Sternhell, Menachem Brinker, and Ilana Hamerman (27 January 1994).

^33. These words were used, for instance, by Uri Bernstein, an author, poet, and professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, during a public debate entitled ‘The racist discussion on publishing Céline the racist,’ on 18 February 1994.

^34. This phrase is taken from the title of an Israeli documentary film directed by Asher Tlalim from 1994. Don't Touch my Holocaust follows the experiences of actors and audiences at the Akko Theatre Centre's performance Arbeit Macht Frei, directed by Dudi Ma'ayan. It presents a unique viewpoint on the traumatic collective experience of the Holocaust and its influence on subsequent generations in Israel.

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Michal Aharony

Michal Aharony earned her Ph.D. in political science from the New School for Social Research. Her book Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality and Resistance is forthcoming (2014) with Routledge. Aharony has published several articles on Arendt. In 2011–2013 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. In 2010, Aharony was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the history of political ideas in modern political thought and Holocaust studies.